Guide OBS Studio FFmpeg Upgrade

Upgrade/Update FFmpeg in OBS Studio

It is no secret that software will progress and improve, and this applies to OBS Studio's dependencies too. Therefore it is in every power-users interest to update or replace FFmpeg with a newer or more optimized version when possible. While updating is restricted to a certain version range, it is still a worthwhile upgrade at times. Note that this guide is only applicable to Windows, other platforms have to find their own way.

Notably the following OBS Studio versions benefit massively from the upgrade:

• OBS Studio 27.x, which ship with older but patched FFmpeg versions.
• OBS Studio 29.x, which appears to ship sub-optimal x264, svt-av1 and aom-av1 encoders.

⚠ Warning! ⚠

This process is destructive and will void all warranty and support promises of OBS Studio, all plugins, and all related software. You are entirely on your own and will be ignored by support if you choose to go down this path. It is only necessary to access some functionality that OBS Studio does not build into FFmpeg by default.

Steps

1. Close all related (and sometimes unrelated) instances of OBS Studio.
2. Locate the OBS Studio directory for which you wish to replace the FFmpeg binaries.
3. Navigate to the /bin/64bit directories within.
4. Now look at avcodec-##.dll:
   • avcodec-57.dll is FFmpeg 3.x
   • avcodec-58.dll is FFmpeg 4.x
   • avcodec-59.dll is FFmpeg 5.x
   • avcodec-60.dll is FFmpeg 6.x
5. Download or build a matching shared library FFmpeg version.
   • gyan.dev is our preferred pre-built FFmpeg provider.
   • BtbN is another alternative, but often breaks OBS Studio.
6. Extract the avcodec-##.dll, avdevice-##.dll, avfilter-##.dll, avformat-##.dll, avutil-##.dll, swresample-##.dll and swscale-##.dll and replace the files in the bin directory.
7. Launch OBS Studio as normal, and enjoy your updated FFmpeg.